Philips Hue/Home Assistant How-To?

Lighting Wiki & How-To's
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Hi everyone. I recently purchased a house and have started down the road of turning it into my dream smart home. I’m at a point where I’m really stuck and was hoping some people within the community might be able to help.

Here’s my set-up: My server is running TrueNAS Scale, and within that, the Home Assistant and zwave2jsmqtt apps. My house currently has a mixture of regular bulbs and about 20 Philips Hue bulbs in various rooms that are currently controlled by Lutron’s Aurora dials (which I hate) and connected through a Philips Hue Bridge. I’ve spent a ton of time researching different switches and solutions, and I settled on Inovelli because it seemed like their switches were the only ones that:

  1. Had good switch quality
  2. Would expose light switches to HA
  3. Allows for control of Philips Hue lights by changing local control functionality
  4. Supports both on/off and dimming functionality

I purchased one LZW31 from eBay as a trial to figure out if I could get it connected to my z-wave network, wired up correctly, and control my Hue lights in the way I want it to. Unfortunately, I seem to be stuck, and I can’t find a tutorial or detailed documentation that can walk me through this process. I’ve done a ton of research, and it seems like everyone’s setup varies slightly from me in some way.

My questions are, in order:

  1. With the above setup (no SmartThings or Inovelli Blue Switches), am I able to control (both turn on/off and dim) my Philips Hue rooms?
  2. If I can use a LZW31 to control my lights, is the responsiveness of the on/off and/or dimming functionality bad enough that I should consider another option?
    * If the responsiveness is not a problem, can someone point me towards a tutorial that walks through the process using the container version of Home Assistant?
  3. If either I can’t use an LZW31 for this, or if the dimming experience is not great, what can I do? Are Blue switches the answer?

Really hoping the community can help guide me in the right direction here. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Bill

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LZW31-SN assumed (red dimmer).

This is z-wave, so direct control via binding is out. So you’ll just use Home Assistant. Yes HA can use the “scenes” (single/multi-press) to control the Hue lights. It won’t be immediate, but should be reasonably fast. You won’t get good dimming control though.

Blue Series bound to the bulbs (have to move to same network, will have to move OFF hue hub) will be much MUCH faster and more reliable and have better dimming control.

Make sure you use smart bulb mode!

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Thanks for the reply. If this particular switch won’t work well with Hue bulbs as a dimmer, do you know if there’s a way to disable dimmer functionality? For example, I could move this switch out to my garage, which uses florescent lights. Obviously, I don’t think they’re dimmer (nor would I want them to be), so would I be able to just disable dimmer/scene functionality and use this as a simple connected smart switch?

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Absolutely. Make sure you are on the latest firmware and set parameter 52 to 2.

Great resource for learning about all of the options:

Also, don’t use this dimmer for fluorescent. It’s not meant for/good at fluorescent loads. Incandescent/CFL/LED all ok (LED can be picky so check for compatibility!)/